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17-letter words containing a, r, y, i

  • probability curve — a curve that describes the distribution of probability over the values of a random variable.
  • product liability — the responsibility of a manufacturer for injury or loss caused by its product.
  • professional army — an army of trained soldiers
  • proficiency badge — an insignia or device granted by the Girl Scouts and worn especially on a uniform to indicate special achievement.
  • progressive party — a political party formed in 1912 under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, advocating popular control of government, direct primaries, the initiative, the referendum, woman suffrage, etc.
  • prohibition party — a U.S. political party organized in 1869, advocating the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
  • proprietary brand — a brand of product that is privately owned and controlled
  • psychographically — Psychology. a graph indicating the relative strength of the personality traits of an individual.
  • psychoprophylaxis — Lamaze method.
  • psychotherapeutic — psychotherapy.
  • pull your head in — be quiet!
  • purely and simply — You use purely and simply to emphasize that the thing you are mentioning is the only thing involved.
  • pyroligneous acid — a yellowish, acidic, water-soluble liquid, containing about 10 percent acetic acid, obtained by the destructive distillation of wood: used for smoking meats.
  • pyrosulfuric acid — a strong, crystalline acid, H2S2O7, prepared commercially as a heavy, oily, fuming liquid: used in making explosives and dyes, as a sulfating agent, etc.
  • quality assurance — a system for ensuring a desired level of quality in the development, production, or delivery of products and services: Quality assurance for nursing homes begins with a set of standards. Abbreviation: QA.
  • quality newspaper — a more serious newspaper which gives detailed accounts of world events, as well as reports on business, culture, and society
  • quality paperback — a softbound book that is usually larger and more expensive than a mass market paperback and is sold primarily in bookstores as a trade book.
  • quantity surveyor — A quantity surveyor is a person who calculates the cost and amount of materials and workers needed for a job such as building a house or a road.
  • quantum chemistry — the application of quantum mechanics to the study of chemical phenomena.
  • radial (ply) tire — a motor vehicle tire having a foundation of plies of rubberized cords running at right angles to the center line of the tread: it provides better handling, etc. than a bias ply tire
  • radial keratotomy — a surgical technique for correcting nearsightedness by making a series of spokelike incisions in the cornea to change its shape and focusing properties.
  • radiant intensity — a measure of the amount of radiation emitted from a point expressed as the radiant flux per unit solid angle leaving this source
  • radiation therapy — x-rays used as treatment
  • radioactive decay — decay (def 8).
  • railway timetable — a list of railway journeys arranged according to the time when they begin and end
  • rapid prototyping — (programming)   The creation of a working model of a software module to demonstrate the feasibility and suitability of the function. The prototype is expected to be replaced or refined before inclusion in the final product. Rapid prototyping contrasts with a DIRFT approach which emphasises careful design and implementation to avoid the overheads of debugging and testing prototype code. Rapid prototyping is appropriate when the requirements are unclear or likely to change (which is most of the time).
  • raynaud's disease — a vascular disorder of unknown cause, characterized by recurrent episodes of blanching and numbness of the fingers and toes and sometimes the tip of the nose and ears, usually triggered by stress or exposure to cold.
  • read-write memory — a type of computer memory that you can write to as well as read from
  • ready and waiting — If you want to emphasize that a person is properly prepared for something, or that something can now be used, you can say that they are ready and waiting.
  • reality principle — the motivating force or mechanism by which the child, who has previously sought immediate gratification of all wishes, realizes that gratification must sometimes be deferred or forgone.
  • recrystallization — to become crystallized again.
  • recursive acronym — (convention)   A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" - and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support". See also mung.
  • reference library — A reference library is a library that contains books which you can look at in the library itself but which you cannot borrow.
  • refractory period — a short period after a nerve or muscle cell fires during which the cell cannot respond to additional stimulation.
  • relative humidity — the amount of water vapor in the air, expressed as a percentage of the maximum amount that the air could hold at the given temperature; the ratio of the actual water vapor pressure to the saturation vapor pressure. Abbreviation: RH, rh.
  • relative majority — the excess of votes or seats won by the winner of an election over the runner-up when no candidate or party has more than 50 per cent
  • respiratory chain — a series of mitochondrial proteins that transport electrons of hydrogen, released in the Krebs cycle, from acetyl coenzyme A to inhaled oxygen to form H 2 O: the energy released in the process is conserved as ATP.
  • respiratory tract — the passages through which air enters and leaves the body
  • reticulate python — a python, Python reticulatus, of southeastern Asia and the East Indies, sometimes growing to a length of 32 feet (10 meters): usually considered to be the largest snake in the world.
  • revolutionary war — American Revolution.
  • rich site summary — (web, standard)   (RSS, blog, feed) A family of standard web document types containing regularly updated, short articles or news items. RSS documents (generally called "RSS feeds", "news feeds" or just "feeds") can be read with an RSS reader like BottomFeeder or Feedly. These are sometimes called "aggregators" because they combine multiple RSS feeds which the user can browse as a single list. The RSS reader tracks which articles the use has read, and is typically set to show only new articles, hence the idea of a "feed" or flow of new items. Most RSS feeds are based on RDF. RDF is a structured document format for describing textual resources such as news articles available on the web. RSS originally stood for "RDF Site Summary" as it was designed to provide short descriptions of (changes to) a website. Because it provides a standard way to deliver, or "syndicate", news or updates from one site to another, RSS is sometimes expanded as "Really Simple Syndication". It is closely associated with blogs, most of which provide an RSS feed of articles.
  • rift valley fever — a highly infectious viral disease of humans and animals, transmitted by mosquitoes and other insects, occurring in Africa and characterized in humans by headache, fever, eye discomfort, and muscle aches, progressing in some cases to encephalitis, blindness, or internal bleeding.
  • role-playing game — a game in which participants adopt the roles of imaginary characters in an adventure under the direction of a Game Master.
  • rotary cultivator — a machine for breaking up and tilling soil, consisting of a series of blades mounted on a revolving power-driven shaft
  • royal institution — a British society founded in 1799 for the dissemination of scientific knowledge
  • safety in numbers — If you say that there is safety in numbers, you mean that you are safer doing something if there are a lot of people doing it rather than doing it alone.
  • safety precaution — a precaution that is taken in order to ensure that something is safe and not dangerous
  • san francisco bay — a bay in W California: the harbor of San Francisco; connected with the Pacific by the Golden Gate strait. 50 miles (80 km) long; 3–12 miles (5–19 km) wide.
  • sanitary landfill — landfill.
  • secondary glazing — insulation by means of a second pane of glass, or a sheet of plastic: a simple form of double glazing
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